Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Chinese govt also has a pretty nasty track record of pressuring erstwhile Chinese citizens to engage in espionage by making life hard for family back in china China also has a history of establishing "police" stations in foreign countries with the mandate to harass and control expats. They did this in Canada at least, surely they did in the US too.
I can only urge you to provide one or more good primary sources if you are making such a claim. It should be a given...
FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
191–200 of 517 posts
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
NSA is probably involved. Edit: the voting pattern in this item is itself unusual.
You're downvoted because you imply a conspiracy exists but cannot articulate what it is.
It should be obvious to anyone that what this guy was doing and/or knows is something that governments are extremely interested in.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#193if you look around, you can find, reconstruct a c.v. this guy is someone you dont want the badguy to get ahold of. AI research in an adversarial context is dual purpose tech, and could easily awaken ITAR
So if AI research is dual-use tech, would an AI research er be dual-use human, and get travel restricted because of weapons export controls. Dude is a weapon!
you might try to make a joke
but US courts had done rulings which where basically like that
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#194So what's going on here then?
https://github.com/wangxiaofeng7/wangxiaofeng7.github.io
Someone making a homepage in the last few days, but to what purpose?
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#195[flagged]
The university would likely not have scrubbed them from their site if they were merely being deported. There are either espionage concerns or this guy solved prime factorization.
The current administration also seems very eager to advertise deportations, so if they're quiet about this one, it's likely something else.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> by the government "disappearing" anyone (which they have objectively been doing lately) Notably, they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here. Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow. This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone. But yes, point taken: the extrajudicial…
It doesn't really matter if the perception is that the state is arresting arbitrary people for arbitrary things.
We here—those of us having a conversation on Hacker News—are capable of analyzing our perceptions and molding them to better fit the observed facts. We do not need to be victims of our own instinctive reactions.
So whether or not it does matter if the facts don't line up with the speculation, it should matter.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Occam’s Razor suggest he was exfiltrated.
I know this is HN and we love these simplistic universal laws here (Hanlon's razor being another beloved law) but Occam’s razor isn’t really applicable here, or at the very least, it isn’t very helpful, and it certainly isn’t conclusive. That he was exfiltrated by the Chinese government also requires the same number of variables as that he was disappeared by the American government. So Occam’s Razor actually suggests…
Just an FYI, you do know that Hanlon's Razor isn't a law, or even a rule of thumb.
It was a joke in a joke book, and has been taken entirely out of context by most people who use it to justify anything.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other. Really? So that he was abducted by aliens is also on the table and has the same probability? Obviously there can be some prior information that makes „he was exfiltrated by Chinese intelligence services“ more likely than „he was disappeared by US intelligence services“. I’m not saying there is, b…
I answered the exfiltration likelihood in a sibling thread. The summary is that spies are very rare and it is not a likely explanation. Keeping the Bayesian hat on we can pretty much rule out aliens. We have never witnessed an alien abduction, so the chances of this being an alien abduction is actually infinitely smaller than exfiltration. We can set the same prior probability to all the possibilities, that is fine.…
Wrapping your conspiracy theories into pseudo-science based on wild guesses doesn't make them more likely.
There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government. It is simply the most likely explanation that this is another instance of that.
It also doesn't make any sense that the US government would secretly "disappear", as you put it, this individual while they are openly deporting thousands elsewhere, often based on flimsy evidence. Furthermore, if you are secretly getting rid of someone, you do it to avoid taking responsibility. Why would you send the FBI to raid their residence afterwards? That immediately connects you to the disappearance, thereby sabotaging your own scheme.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Occam’s Razor suggest he was exfiltrated.
I know this is HN and we love these simplistic universal laws here (Hanlon's razor being another beloved law) but Occam’s razor isn’t really applicable here, or at the very least, it isn’t very helpful, and it certainly isn’t conclusive. That he was exfiltrated by the Chinese government also requires the same number of variables as that he was disappeared by the American government. So Occam’s Razor actually suggests…
> 3 other students have been disappeared by the government
If you're talking about the students I think you are, they're detained in Louisiana and Texas. They haven't been "disappeared" in any way.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily -- if there's evidence of the disappearance being across state borders, FBI might get involved because that's now federal jurisdiction. Similarly, if it's someone of high profile, or involved with a high-profile organization, the local police might also choose to hand that over to the FBI to deal with since they can probably get better access. In this case, this was a professor working on cryptography…
The article claims his status is unknown ("Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown."), but I doubt a non-citizen could be "Director of NSF Center for Distributed Confidential Computing".
The main site of the Center for Distributed Confidential Computing[1] is up, and the chart of "principle investigators" still shows XiaoFeng Wang as the center director. But many other links on that site are broken and pages have been cut down, compared to an archive from last month.[2]
They used to have a Github.[3] But now it says "No public repositories".
Here's their NSF funding.[4][5] About US$3 million. Xiaogang (Cliff) Wang is listed as the principal investigator.
[1] http://nsf-cdcc.org/principle-investigators/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250120221302/https://nsf-cdcc....
[3] https://github.com/CDCC-Project
[4] https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-awards-advance-cybers...
[5] https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2207231&His...